Politically adrift, alienated from Weimar society, and fearful of competition from industrial elites and the working class alike, the independent artisans of interwar Germany were a particularly ...receptive audience for National Socialist ideology. As Hitler consolidated power, they emerged as an important Nazi constituency, drawn by the party's rejection of both capitalism and Bolshevism. Yet, in the years after 1945, the artisan class became one of the pillars of postwar stability, thoroughly integrated into German society.From Craftsmen to Capitalists gives the first account of this astonishing transformation, exploring how skilled tradesmen recast their historical traditions and forged alliances with former antagonists to help realize German democratization and recovery.
Prevalent among classicists today is the notion that Greeks, Romans, and Jews enhanced their own self-perception by contrasting themselves with the so-called Other--Egyptians, Phoenicians, ...Ethiopians, Gauls, and other foreigners--frequently through hostile stereotypes, distortions, and caricature. In this provocative book, Erich Gruen demonstrates how the ancients found connections rather than contrasts, how they expressed admiration for the achievements and principles of other societies, and how they discerned--and even invented--kinship relations and shared roots with diverse peoples.
Gruen shows how the ancients incorporated the traditions of foreign nations, and imagined blood ties and associations with distant cultures through myth, legend, and fictive histories. He looks at a host of creative tales, including those describing the founding of Thebes by the Phoenician Cadmus, Rome's embrace of Trojan and Arcadian origins, and Abraham as ancestor to the Spartans. Gruen gives in-depth readings of major texts by Aeschylus, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plutarch, Julius Caesar, Tacitus, and others, in addition to portions of the Hebrew Bible, revealing how they offer richly nuanced portraits of the alien that go well beyond stereotypes and caricature.
Providing extraordinary insight into the ancient world, this controversial book explores how ancient attitudes toward the Other often expressed mutuality and connection, and not simply contrast and alienation.
Housing is shaped by culturally-specific expectations about the kinds of architecture and furnishings that are appropriate; about how and where different activities should be carried out; and by and ...with whom. It is those expectations, and the wider social and cultural systems of which they are a part, that are explored in this volume. At the same time, the book as a whole argues two larger points: first, that while houses, households and families have in recent years become increasingly important as objects of inquiry in Greek and Roman contexts, their potential as sources of information about broader social-historical issues has yet to be fully realised; and second, that greater weight and independence should be given to material culture as a source for studying ancient history. The book will be invaluable for upper-level undergraduates, graduate students and scholars.
Golden holocaust Proctor, Robert N
2012., 20120129, 2012, c2011., 2012-02-28, 20110101
eBook
The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It is also one of the most beguiling, thanks to more than a century of manipulation at the hands of tobacco industry ...chemists. In Golden Holocaust, Robert N. Proctor draws on reams of formerly-secret industry documents to explore how the cigarette came to be the most widely-used drug on the planet, with six trillion sticks sold per year. He paints a harrowing picture of tobacco manufacturers conspiring to block the recognition of tobacco-cancer hazards, even as they ensnare legions of scientists and politicians in a web of denial. Proctor tells heretofore untold stories of fraud and subterfuge, and he makes the strongest case to date for a simple yet ambitious remedy: a ban on the manufacture and sale of cigarettes.
The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) were the largest political party in Russia in the crucial revolutionary year of 1917. Heirs to the legacy of the People's Will movement, the SRs were unabashed ...proponents of peasant rebellion and revolutionary terror, emphasizing the socialist transformation of the countryside and a democratic system of government as their political goals. They offered a compelling, but still socialist, alternative to the Bolsheviks, yet by the early 1920s their party was shattered and its members were branded as enemies of the revolution. In 1922, the SR leaders became the first fellow socialists to be condemned by the Bolsheviks as "counter-revolutionaries" in the prototypical Soviet show trial.InCaptives of the Revolution,Scott B. Smith presents both a convincing account of the defeat of the SRs and a deeper analysis of the significance of the political dynamics of the Civil War for subsequent Soviet history. Once the SRs decided to openly fight the Bolsheviks in 1918, they faced a series of nearly impossible political dilemmas. At the same time, the Bolsheviks fatally undermined the revolutionary credentials of the SRs by successfully appropriating the rhetoric of class struggle, painting a simplistic picture of Reds versus Whites in the Civil War, a rhetorical dominance that they converted into victory over the SRs and any left-wing alternative to Bolshevik dictatorship. In this narrative, the SRs became a bona fide threat to national security and enemies of the people-a characterization that proved so successful that it became an archetype to be used repeatedly by the Soviet leadership against any political opponents, even those from within the Bolshevik party itself.In this groundbreaking study, Smith reveals a more complex and nuanced picture of the postrevolutionary struggle for power in Russia than we have ever seen before and demonstrates that the Civil War-and in particular the struggle with the SRs-was the formative experience of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet state.
Historians have often either ignored Anacharsis Cloots (1755–1794) or considered him deranged because he claimed to be the ‘orator of the human race’ and devised a ‘universal republic’ based on the ...‘sovereignty of the human race’. This book is the first comprehensive study of the entire body of Cloots’s written works and political actions. By contextualizing them, the book non only rehabilitates Cloots as a political thinker worthy of consideration, but also argues that his political thought constitutes a specific branch of republicanism in the age of Atlantic revolutions: cosmopolitan republicanism. The introduction suggests how 18th-century French cosmopolitanism was a new philosophical tradition, but was composed of several themes, which the book then analyses in Cloots’s writings. The first chapter provides a brief overview of his life. The second chapter explains why he called himself orator and wrote pamphlets, and why contemporary readers should not discard this as non-philosophical. Having established Cloots’s writings as constituting a philosophical system, the following chapters explores it through the themes laid out in the introduction. First, the concept of reason and his understanding of science. Second, the paradigm of natural law and the role of nature in moral and political thought. Third, the conception of humanity and individuals in nature and society. Finally, republicanism and its principles. The last chapter summarizes the elements of Cloots’s cosmopolitan republicanism and opens a research programme to other political thinkers in the age of Atlantic revolutions for historians and political theorists. ; Historians have often either ignored Anacharsis Cloots (1755–1794) or considered him deranged because he claimed to be the ‘orator of the human race’ and devised a ‘universal republic’ based on the ‘sovereignty of the human race’. This book is the first comprehensive study of the entire body of Cloots’s written works and political actions. By contextualizing them, the book non only rehabilitates Cloots as a political thinker worthy of consideration, but also argues that his political thought constitutes a specific branch of republicanism in the age of Atlantic revolutions: cosmopolitan republicanism. The introduction suggests how 18th-century French cosmopolitanism was a new philosophical tradition, but was composed of several themes, which the book then analyses in Cloots’s writings. The first chapter provides a brief overview of his life. The second chapter explains why he called himself orator and wrote pamphlets, and why contemporary readers should not discard this as non-philosophical. Having established Cloots’s writings as constituting a philosophical system, the following chapters explores it through the themes laid out in the introduction. First, the concept of reason and his understanding of science. Second, the paradigm of natural law and the role of nature in moral and political thought. Third, the conception of humanity and individuals in nature and society. Finally, republicanism and its principles. The last chapter summarizes the elements of Cloots’s cosmopolitan republicanism and opens a research programme to other political thinkers in the age of Atlantic revolutions for historians and political theorists.
This book examines the causes and consequences of a major transformation in both domestic and international politics: the shift from dynastically legitimated monarchical sovereignty to popularly ...legitimated national sovereignty. It analyzes the impact of Enlightenment discourse on politics in eighteenth-century Europe and the United States, showing how that discourse facilitated new authority struggles in Old Regime Europe, shaped the American and French Revolutions, and influenced the relationships between the revolutionary regimes and the international system. The interaction between traditional and democratic ideas of legitimacy transformed the international system by the early nineteenth century, when people began to take for granted the desirability of equality, individual rights, and restraint of power. Using an interpretive, historically sensitive approach to international relations, the author considers the complex interplay between elite discourses about political legitimacy and strategic power struggles within and among states. She shows how culture, power, and interests interacted to produce a crucial yet poorly understood case of international change.
Uprooted Thum, Gregor
2011., 20110808, 2011, 2011-08-08, 20110101
eBook
With the stroke of a pen at the Potsdam Conference following the Allied victory in 1945, Breslau, the largest German city east of Berlin, became the Polish city of Wroclaw. Its more than six hundred ...thousand inhabitants--almost all of them ethnic Germans--were expelled and replaced by Polish settlers from all parts of prewar Poland. Uprooted examines the long-term psychological and cultural consequences of forced migration in twentieth-century Europe through the experiences of Wroclaw's Polish inhabitants.
From Ernest and Julio Gallo to Francis Ford Coppola, Italians have shaped the history of California wine. More than any other group, Italian immigrants and their families have made California ...viticulture one of America's most distinctive and vibrant achievements, from boutique vineyards in the Sonoma hills to the massive industrial wineries of the Central Valley. But how did a small group of nineteenth-century immigrants plant the roots that flourished into a world-class industry? Was there something particularly Italianin their success?In this fresh, fascinating account of the ethnic origins of California wine, Simone Cinotto rewrites a century-old triumphalist story. He demonstrates that these Italian visionaries were not skilled winemakers transplanting an immemorial agricultural tradition, even if California did resemble the rolling Italian countryside of their native Piedmont. Instead, Cinotto argues that it was the wine-makers' access to social capital, or the ethnic and familial ties that bound them to their rich wine-growing heritage, and not financial leverage or direct enological experience, that enabled them to develop such a successful and influential wine business. Focusing on some of the most important names in wine history - particularly Pietro Carlo Rossi, Secondo Guasti, and the Gallos - he chronicles a story driven by ambition and creativity but realized in a complicated tangle of immigrant entrepreneurship, class struggle, racial inequality, and a new world of consumer culture.Skillfully blending regional, social, and immigration history, Soft Soil, Black Grapes takes us on an original journey into the cultural construction of ethnic economies and markets, the social dynamics of American race, and the fully transnational history of American wine.
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britainasks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did ...law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap?
Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading.
Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history.How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britainreshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.
